Stanford Security Seminar

Internet Censorship: Studies from China and Turkey

Dan S. Wallach

Abstract:

Nation-state online censorship takes many forms, including network-layer firewalls as well as application-layer censorship. This talk discusses measurements of Weibo, a popular social network in China, and Twitter, popular in much of the rest of the world. We show how fast and how effective Weibo can be at removing controversial topics once they've been deemed controversial. We similarly show how effectively Twitter responds to censorship requests from foreign governments, measuring two orders of magnitude more "withheld content" than disclosed in Twitter's "transparency reports".

Bio:

Dan S. Wallach is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and a Rice Scholar in the Baker Institute of Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, Texas.